Hesitation
by Halia Stone
Summary: What if Damon couldn't hand Katherine over to Silas so easily?


Damon held back a sigh as Elena relayed the details of her conversation with the biology professor she and Caroline were drooling over. Last thing he needed were those Whitmore and Augustine bastards sniffing around; as if he didn't have enough on his plate with a dead Bonnie Bennett, a pissed off amnesiac little brother and a dried-up Silas on his living room couch desperate to become a witch again.

(Well, he was pretty much a cheap imitation of a vampire, so Damon didn't blame him for that one)

He crossed over to his liquor cart and began pouring glasses of bourbon for himself and Elena, deciding to keep quiet about his past with the Whitmore's and Augustine—especially that woman he'd snuck off to kill during their summer together—and that she was never going to know.

No-one would.

"So, Professor Blondie knows about vampires?" he wondered, catching sight of the dried-up grey prune Silas currently was (and made a mental note to stop pissing off witches...) and feeling a weird pit in his stomach at what he needed to do to resuscitate him and turn him back into a witch.

"He said that if I don't drop out of school, the wrong people are gonna start asking the 'right questions'," Elena said with a heavy sigh, nervously shifting on the couch and crossing her legs.

"That's not good." Damon gave her a sympathetic smile as he handed her the other glass of bourbon. "What are you gonna do?" he asked, taking his own glass and perching on the arm of the couch Silas' corpse was laying on.

Elena sighed and shook her head. "I don't know," she shrugged, "but all I do know is that finding out the truth about Megan isn't gonna bring Bonnie back," she added, her eyes down casting at the thought of her best friend.

"Yeah, well neither is a desiccated Silas in our living room," Damon said with an unceremonious snort in his direction, kicking the corpse's leg.

"So, the only way for Silas to trade in his life for Bonnie's is if he's a witch," she relayed, more to herself than him, "but the only way to become a witch is to have the cure?" she asked, looking, for a split-second, regretful that she wasted it by shoving it down Katherine's throat.

Little did she know... "Yep," Damon confirmed, popping the 'p' while Elena's face fell a little.

There was a sudden, brisk knock at the door and Damon smiled at Elena's confused look. As if the timing could have been any more perfect.

"What?" Elena asked, clocking his expression as she glanced from the door to him.

Damon's smile widened, and he put his drink down. "Now, who could _that _be?" he said with a small laugh.

He crossed to the front door to let his 'guest' in, ignoring the pit in his stomach that was growing stronger as Katherine stood there completely oblivious to the fact he was about to murder her.

"What's so urgent?" she snapped at him, pushing past to let herself in and Damon made no move to stop her, "I'm on the run, don't exactly have time for a pit stop," she reminded him snidely.

As he shut, and locked, the front door behind him Damon wondered why Katherine had come here after an incredibly vague phone call. He didn't even have to make up a lie about Stefan to tug on whatever heartstrings she had, she had just agreed to come. But why? It wasn't like she owed him anything.

And it wasn't like she was going to be a willing participant in bringing Bonnie back to life, especially at the cost of her own. Surely if she even had an inkling of what was about to happen she would've put Mystic Falls in her rear-view mirror as fast as she could.

Surely, she would. She managed to stay five steps ahead of one of the most vengeful and vindictive bastards he ever had the displeasure of meeting for five hundred years.

Thinking otherwise brought Damon an inexplicable feeling of guilt that he immediately quashed like a bug. This was what they needed to do to bring Bonnie back and he could guarantee that if the roles were reversed and Katherine had a chance to regain her immortality she would screw them all over and _then _some.

A triumphant laugh coming from the woman herself snapped Damon out of his thoughts and he walked over to where Katherine was, with Elena staring between the two of them with a bewildered expression on her face.

"Or maybe I do," Katherine summarized with a broadening smile as she stared at the latest person that had forced her to run for her life, realizing he was physically incapable of hunting her down, "Maybe I have all the time in the world," she added gleefully, laughing again.

Damon felt something twinge inside him. He used to love that laugh; _live_ for that laugh... It felt strange to know he was never going to hear it again and that after today, five centuries after eluding death, Katherine Pierce would be no more.

Why was he dwelling on this? She'd crushed his heart into pieces and proven time and time again she didn't care if he died and would probably throw him into a volcano if it got her what she wanted.

He forced these thoughts back down, realizing Katherine was speaking again;

"Katherine Pierce eludes death yet again!" she boasted with a grin, turning around to smirk at him and Elena, "and you two idiots finally did something right for once," she added with a snide undertone, "How does it feel?" she asked with another laugh.

Damon allowed himself a smirk of his own as he flashed Katherine his vampire visage. "_Thrilling_," he said in a mocking, triumphant tone.

The color drained from Katherine's face and her heart started to race. "Damon, _no_," she said with a vehement shake of her head and a half-hearted glare that would've probably been intimidating if she was still a powerful vampire.

He shot forwards and grabbed her by the shoulders, so she couldn't run, the interaction making him feel strange because beforehand she could've crushed his bones to dust and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

"He needs the cure to become a witch," he said slowly, increasing his grip, as if he was trying to rationalize—as if he actually needed to—killing the woman that destroyed his life.

It took more effort than Damon would've thought to summon his fangs and sink them into Katherine's neck, being incredibly careful not to get a single drop of her cure-laced blood in his mouth.

Katherine's pained and terrified scream made him loosen his grip in confusion. Normally he reveled in that sound from a victim; the quickened heartbeat, the nervous sweat and the widened, desperate eyes. But hearing and seeing those things associated with Katherine Pierce made his blood run cold.

However, he needed to do this to be rid of Silas. There was no other way.

"No!" Katherine screamed, pushing, punching and clawing at him to try and get him off her as desperate tears pooled in her eyes.

Damon tried to remain emotionless as he edged her towards Silas' waiting corpse, her nails digging into his skin as she wildly shook her head.

"No, no, no, Damon," she begged through her tears, frantically grabbing onto the neckline of his shirt, "No, no, _please!_"—her desperate grip tore the neckline slightly—"He needs all of my blood, it'll kill me, Damon." That last was hitched with a horrified sob and her tears spilled and ran down her face.

Damon's feet turned to clay and he stopped trying to inch Katherine closer as those words came out of her mouth.

She did know.

That caused an inexplicable surge of anger. She knew and came here anyway?

It left a bad taste in his mouth that Katherine Pierce willingly walked into her own death. She had enough self-awareness a hundred and forty-five years ago that when she so much as thought one of Klaus's minions might have found her she organized a massive vampire hunt to fake her own death.

He wasn't sure why he was so angry or at who. Himself for bringing her here or Katherine for not feeling that something was off about the whole affair and refusing point blank to come.

"Damon, _please_, I don't want to die," she was sobbing, her eyes widening as she probably realized he didn't owe her anything after the many times she had screwed him over.

He shook her hands off, but they reattached themselves with bruising force, Katherine's knuckles going white;

"I don't want to die, Damon. I don't want to die," she repeated in a frantic, tearful mantra, looking right into his eyes, "_Please_."

Damon stopped again, his grip on her softening out of pure shock as he saw the raw emotion in her eyes that she was allowing him to see; the fear that he was sure she viewed as a weakness and buried under five hundred years of concrete walls no-one could penetrate; the desperation to live which almost single-handedly drove every action and decision she ever made.

He felt his mouth moving and heard the word before his brain processed it: "Run."

He let her go but Katherine remained rooted to the spot, looking like a deer caught in headlights. "W-What?" she asked in utter confusion, swallowing the lump in her throat.

Damon grabbed her and shook her out of her confused daze. "Damn it, Katherine, _run!_" he growled through gritted teeth, shoving her in the direction of the front door.

Katherine stumbled on her heels before she regained her bearings and rushed towards the door as fast as her shaking legs allowed, her trembling fingers struggling to undo the lock.

Once she wrenched it open Damon expected her to disappear into the night without so much as a backward glance, but he was floored at the look she gave him. Despite looking more shocked than he felt at his actions, he could see a genuine undercurrent of gratitude amidst the shining tears.

The door slammed behind her and Damon stared blankly in the direction she'd gone, only remembering Elena was even in the room when her confused and livid face appeared in his field of vision and his ears were pierced with an indignant cry of;

"Damon!"

"What the hell did you just do?!" she asked, looking absolutely horrified, although Damon could hardly hear her over the steadily building roar in his head, "We lost our one chance to bring Bonnie back!"

He knew that, yet he couldn't find it within himself in that moment to care about Bonnie Bennett. His mind was currently occupied by Katherine Pierce.

He had literally held her life in his hands and stood a chance of being rid of her; he didn't even need to do the deed himself—all he had to do was place her bleeding neck in Silas' mouth and let him drain her dry. It wasn't like three years ago when he would've had to plunge a stake into her heart. So why couldn't he just do it? _Why_ couldn't he kill her as easily as she would've killed him in that situation?

She destroyed him and shattered everything good about him; turned him into a killer that reveled in the terror and destruction he could wreak and filled his head with lies of a reciprocated, passionate, all-consuming love that ultimately was his reason for living for a hundred and forty-five years; his memories of her a driving force for not closing his eyes and giving in to the torture Augustine subjected him to in the name of 'science'.

Damon snapped out of his muddied mess of thoughts when he saw Elena's lips were still moving and her voice was starting to pierce through the whine in his head;

"And we finally could've been free of Katherine, what were you—?" She stopped and angrily narrowed her eyes at him. "Damon, are you even listening to me?" she wondered incredulously.

He was genuinely trying to but he couldn't stop hearing Katherine's voice in his head, '...there's a part of you that doesn't want me to die'. He felt sick thinking she was right; after all he had offered her his blood to be turned back into a vampire.

"How could you save her?" Elena ranted on, sounding more bewildered than betrayed, "After everything she did to us—to _you?!_" she added in utter exasperation, flinging her hands towards him.

"Elena, just..." Damon held up a hand to stop her incessant babbling, feeling uncharacteristically weak-kneed, "Shut up, for five minutes, please," he said with a heavy sigh, forcing his legs to walk towards the glass of bourbon he had put down earlier.

Thankfully Elena fell silent without protesting, collapsing down onto the couch as she tried to comprehend what had just happened in her own mind. Damon took a gulp of his bourbon, but it left a sour taste in his mouth.

In a sudden wave of rage, he tossed the glass at the wall, splashing bourbon over the walls as glass rained everywhere. Why had he let Katherine go? He hadn't owed her anything and before today he could've sworn he'd be glad to see her dead; hollow bones and he wouldn't even shed a tear.

Elena gasped at his sudden outburst, quickly on her feet and hesitantly edging towards him. "Damon?" she whispered quietly.

He didn't respond but jerked away when he saw her hand reaching for his shoulder to comfort him. All he saw was Katherine frantically grabbing at him and the feel of her nails desperately clinging to him was back and suffocating him.

"I need some air," he said shortly, brushing past Elena and leaving the boarding house without a backward glance.

The cool night air did nothing to clear his head, so he got into his Camaro and revved out of the driveway, just deciding to drive until he either crashed or something started to make sense in his head.

For all his big talk and bravado regarding his delight at Katherine's death Damon just couldn't kill her; not three years ago at the masquerade ball and not ten minutes ago. He couldn't kill the woman who had gotten into his bloodstream and poisoned everything good about him and mercilessly shattered his heart into a thousand pieces.

He couldn't because—

He swerved violently when the realization him

—in some twisted way he still loved her.

* * *

**Pretty much what it says on the tin, fellas. I won't even bother ranting with what I thought about that scene, I'll be here all year otherwise. But I hope you enjoyed and will let me know (even if you didn't). And I'll see you all next time.**


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